MegaTokyo is a web comic/manga written and drawn by Fred "Piro" Gallagher. Fred is notorious for missing updates for various reasons, but exactly how bad is he? In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I decided to find out.

Step one was to take a copy of the complete comics dropdown which appears on every MT comics page. This contained all the information I needed about what comics had been uploaded when. I copied this into a spreadsheet and got to work. There were significant errors which needed correcting - several of the dates had the wrong year listed, for example, others were uploaded a day early or late - but these were cleaned up as best I could.

Then I matched the comics given against a table of every day since Monday, August 14, 2000, the date of the first MT comic. MT's update schedule is one comic every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This enabled me to find what dates had missed comics, what dates had extra comics, and what have you. After this I went through the archived news posts seeking out the posssible reasons for these updating hiccups. This helped explain a lot of the hiccups, though not all of them.

After that I set about finding running totals for the number of comics which should have been uploaded, the number of comics which had been uploaded, and the discrepancy.

Here's what I found.

The last comic taken into account here is #683 from Monday, March 7, 2005. If I feel the irresistible urge to update this page at some time in the future I will, but I certainly won't be updating every time Fred uploads - or doesn't upload - a new comic. I'll probably leave it for at least a year.

Analysis

The final total of 31 missed comics may be a little harsh. In August 2001, Fred moved to a Tuesday/Thursday schedule for four weeks, which he stuck to, though the program doesn't take that into account, so we can probably forgive him those four comics. There are four more comic he misses due to hosting issues, though would it be too much to expect these to be made up to the readers at a later date?

However, completely overlooked in this listing because it'd take a complete run through the MT archive which I don't have the time or energy for, are the many, many, MANY Dead Piro Days, Shirt Guy Dom days, and miscellaneous other filler strips which, entertaining or not, didn't contribute any material to the main course of the MegaTokyo story arc. Classifying a strip as part of the "comic proper" or not is a risky business, there are too many grey areas, but fortunately we don't need to. At the bottom of almost every comic is a tiny footer indicating the date of the comic, and both the raw comic number (listed in square brackets in the table above) AND the "actual" comic number, discounting filler strips. For comic #683 this reads "03.07.2005 [0683] 06:38" which means this is "actual" comic number 638. At least, it is according to Fred, and who am I to argue?

So the final breakdown is this:

• Optimal number of comics: 715
• Number of comics we could fairly expect: 707 (100%)
• Number of "real" comics: 638 (90%)
• Number of filler comics: 46 (7%)
• Number of missed comics: 23 (3%)

There you have it: on average, one in ten MegaTokyo comics are filler or missing.

Comments

I will say this much: I stopped reading MT a long, long time ago, predominantly due to Fred's unreliability. I know it was only stickmen, but I managed a thousand straight daily comics without missing a beat! And Penny Arcade are regular as clockwork, come rain, shine, gaming convention, illness or baby. Is it too much to expect from a man whose comic is his full-time job that he at least occasionally meet his deadlines?

Well, that's enough editorialising for one day. Time to Riem some surfaces.